Friday, December 5, 2014

SLIFF 2014: Patema Inverted

Title: Patema Inverted

Country: Japan

Rating: 7.5

Super Mario
Galaxy, Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014). These days it seems like everybody
is attracted to gravity. Patema Inverted has its own twist on the popular
fundamental force: Patema comes from a clan that lives underground where all
the people and objects are pulled upward by gravity. She meets Age, a boy from
the surface where people and objects are pulled downward by gravity. The two
team up to fight Age’s oppressive government and end up discovering strange new
places and long buried secrets about their world’s past.

Patema continues
an anime tradition of having strong young female leads exploring a
fantasy/sci-fi world and overcoming an evil threat to their community, and
while that specific formula isn’t new, it’s one that has survived a lot of
worthwhile variations. Director Yasuhiro Yoshiura (Pale Caccoon, Time of Eve)
doesn’t waste his gravity gimmick here, and the film does a fantastic job
working through the ups and downs of opposing forces.

The visuals really
sell some of the ideas that would otherwise be pretty hard to convey: the
terrifying fear of falling into the sky, how to interact with someone or
something with a different ‘gravity persuasion’ than your own, the new
possibilities in terms of fighting in or navigating through an environment
designed in another direction, the difficulty of capturing someone you can’t
hold down.

I really loved the way that all the characters in Patema insist on
using terms like top, bottom, floor, ceiling, upside-down, invert, etc., from
their own perspective. There is no ‘correct’ or ‘established’ gravity. Even the
camera is democratic about which way is up, a move that is smart for a lot of
reasons, not least because of the delight one finds in seeing familiar objects
in unfamiliar ways.

Whether intentional or not, deciding to translate a ‘person
with non-locally-standard gravity’ as ‘invert’ also means the movie is open to
a very welcome pro-LGBT interpretation, but I won’t belabor that point.

Patema didn’t knock
my socks off, but it does characters, story and art well. I would only have
suggested changing or entirely removing the villain. This one is ludicrous, lacking
in sound motives and leaned on overtly as a crutch to move the story forward.
In actually he only holds the movie back.